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Frederick’s brief suzerainty. The old enthusiasm, the old feeling for the place is gone. Lautner mentions this to Frederick who is not altogether displeased to hear it. He looks to Alfred now to compensate for his own vanished charm with a lifetime of unstinting toil.
    On the whole, life is very pleasant, very comfortable. In her drawing-room, lightly touching the roses brought in that morning by the gardener, Sofka smiles, listens, sits contented. Being a lady, she does very little, but her house is well run, as it should be, her monogrammed linen immaculate, and the soft sweet food that she prefers always lavish. Above her head the girls, Mimi and Betty, practise their scales. Betty has developed a very good singing voice, and sometimes Mimi accompanies her in a performance of Massenet’s
‘Elégie’
(
‘O doux printemps
d’autrefois
…’) which is too old for her. All the songs that Betty favours are too old for her, just as her clothes are too young; there is something about Betty that is impatient to discard the clothes and investigate the songs. It is Mimi, the serious one, who conscientiously rips through the accompaniment of
‘Les Filles de Cadiz’
, which her sister sings with many a haughty glance and a smouldering expression, both directed at the walls of the old nursery. Sofka, who does not see the glances, because she is not looking for them, hears only the refracted melody, and, in her drawing-room, gently beats time with her hand. When she next has a tea-party for Carrie and Steffie and Letty, and when their husbands, Max, Sam, Dizzy (Desmond), come to collect them and sit down briefly to enjoy a glass of schnapps, Sofka will ask the girls to perform one of their duets on the drawing-room piano.
‘Les Filles de Cadiz’
comes to be their party piece, although Betty’s performance leaves one of the visitors with a tiny doubt in his mind. Carrie, too, that redoubtable matron, looks thoughtful, but being of the same immaculate presentation as Sofka herself, preserves a gracious expression.
    All this time Alfred is in his room, using his remaining hours of leisure to cram in as many books as possible. He dreams of a vast library, kept under lock and key, for his own private use. So anxious is he that this domain must be safely guarded that he sometimes denies that he has been reading at all, when his mother lays a hand to his hot brow. ‘I was thinking about next year at the factory,’ Alfred tells her, and this is not altogether a lie, since the factory is what he most dreads and fears. He does not know that when he starts at the factory he will inherit power, and that means power to buy books. It seems to him, or would do, if anybody ever bothered to explain it to him, such a complicated and uninteresting manipulationof access to the printed word. Reading, to Alfred, means his cool back bedroom at home, with a curtain blowing in front of the open window, and a white counterpane on his soft bed and his dead father’s desk in the corner, waiting to be made his own. Reading, for Alfred, means a dream of home that he is condemned to lose, to forfeit, in some unsought trial of manhood. Reading means his sister’s voice drifting up the stairs and the polite clapping of the visitors and the faint chink of coffee-cups. Reading means Mimi knocking at his door and handing in a glistening slice of cherry tart. Only Mimi bothers to knock. For this, Alfred loves her best. His mother must never know this.
    And Frederick, as time passes? Frederick has discussed so many women with his mother that he has betrayed them all. Frederick sits where Sofka has always wanted him to sit, opposite her, in the chair her husband once and briefly occupied. Frederick has filled out considerably: he is now violin shaped, and his beautiful face has the ruined charm of a professional voluptuary. This adds to his attraction in the eyes of some, but not of all. He is beginning imperceptibly to resemble those cheerful husbands (Max,